The historians say they have thousands of original documents such as letters and diaries, and surveys of vast numbers of veterans.

Someone should contact them and tell them that they do not know how to carry out research and do their job.

Jim, this quote earlier today is also Margaret Macmillan, as you would know if you read it.

"It was only at the end of the decade(1920s) that doubts crept in; the war had left a troubled world and the 1930s brought the threat of another great conflict. Increasingly, the Great War, as it was known, came to be seen as something that should never have happened and, still worse, that had settled nothing and destroyed much. Revisionist views of the war meshed with growing concerns in the democracies that another war was on its way. In 1934-35, nearly half the adult population of Britain voted for the peace ballot to show their support for the League of Nations and disarmament. Much of the great anti-war literature, including Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That, Wilfred Owen's poems and the play Journey's End, came out around this time. Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front was published to huge acclaim in 1929. Yet far more novels and memoirs at the time were either ambivalent about the rightness or otherwise of the war or, indeed, saw it as something that had had to be fought. And not everyone who had been in the war wanted to forget it. Millions joined veterans' associations, in part to recapture the camaraderie they had once felt."

"Now is surely the right time to challenge the accepted views. The wartime generals were not all cowards and incompetents as Alan Clark argued in his infamous The Donkeys (1961). A new generation of British historians, among others, has done much to explode such lazy generalisation and show that commanders developed both strategies and tactics that, in the end, worked. And was the war just a dreadful mistake or was it about something? At the time people on all sides thought they had a just cause. It is condescending and wrong to think they were hoodwinked. British soldiers felt they were fighting for their country and its values; French, German or Russian soldiers felt much the same."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/7b6f0490-6347-11e3-a87d-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2oJ9WwKyd